Hello, I'm a TRA - ask me anything

[AlphaTransWoman]

Good evening,

I'm a transgender rights advocate. I say "advocate" rather than "activist" because I believe in constructive debate and consensus building rather than the hostile, shouty kind of activism that gets us nowhere.

I am here because I am genuinely interested in seeing if there is some kind of compromise that can be reached between pro trans and gender critical views. Obviously this is difficult because we may disagree about something pretty fundamental. I feel passionately that trans women are women (at least in the psychological and social sense), so there's an obvious divide if you do not.

The question is, can we find ways to co-exist and find an acceptable way forward on some of the difficult issues that arise around trans acceptance? So I'm happy to have a go answering anything you care to ask in good faith. Who knows, we might even make some progress.

"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man. You take a step towards him, he takes a step back. "Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.

Men are expecting women to negotiate the definition of woman. But they frame it as being kind, inclusive, progressive.

This new definition doesnt improve the lives of women and girls, it isnt part of feminism or womens rights. At best its a distraction, at worst, the new definition will make it impossible to identify and solve problems women and girls face.

@devondad1 how do your trans women friends present as women. What it is it about their appearance that they change to try and appear as women?

Trans women make issues for women worse because they conform to gender stereotypes in order to appear as women.

You believe a man who says they are a woman, therefore allowed to intrude on women in women’s spaces? Therefore allowed to compete in women’s sports, be on single sex hospital wards, rape crisis centres all to the detriment of women. But have no clue what actually being a woman is, no idea what it actually means. It’s quite easy, for someone who isn’t impacted by the issue to simply believe it. Someone like you.

Transwomen in women’s spaces is damaging for women’s it’s pushing women and girls out of sport. It’s making them vulnerable to rape and sexual assault in hospitals and so on.

Transwomen in the work place, being included as women in gender pay gap (should be sex based pay gap) is causing a distortion in data. Trans women being named ‘women of the year’ is pushing women out of spaces designed to celebrate women.

All for the benefit of biological men. How is that helping equality exactly?

You can not be a woman simply because you say you are.

I don’t understand how a gay man can completely be ok with TRAs. Since many believe single sex attraction does exist and if someone is only attracted to a certain sex, they are transphobic. It’s hugely homophobic.

My only intention on this thread was to make clear their are many different factors at play
You came to mansplain that men could be women for the asking. Bog off.

My only intention on this thread was to make clear their are many different factors at play.

What factors? All you have said is 'be nice to men who say they are women'. No critical thinking applied at all. This is what we get all the time. Men come here to tell us what to think and how to behave and when we ask why they cannot come up with one single reason. So they slink away.

What part of your global policy is towards helping child brides @devondad1 ?

They can't identify out of this because being female is not an identity. You sound incredibly ignorant of the issues females face across the globe but, most importantly, you sound like you just don't care. You should be utterly ashamed of yourself.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15082550

Some 40% of the world's child marriages take place in India. In the northern state of Rajasthan I witnessed the wedding of two sisters who were about six and 11 years old.

@devondad1

As a gay man who believes trans women are women and presumably that trans men are men, how do you feel about having a sexual relationship with a trans man that hasn't undergone surgery. (Just as most trans women haven't.)

Obviously if they're men you'll be potentially sexually attracted to a trans man, yes?

How do so many men insert themselves into this issue, believing that women just don’t understand it. And if they simply mansplain it, women will then decide we will ignore or rights, give up our spaces, willingly increase the risk we are at and simply accept.

and these men are doing it while being oblivious to the sexism they are displaying. It’s like they genuinely think women’s issue is that it hasn’t been explained properly and insisting women accommodate trans women means they can’t possibly be sexist.

Proves how fucked up so many men’s thinking is when it comes to women

👏👏👏👏👏

Neither woman nor trans.

But happy to tell women what they should do about men invading their spaces.

And with some responsibility for global policy in this area???!

Well that’s not concerning at all 🙄

Deep down, I know I am a man. I don't know why I know that

I find it very strange that some people have decided that because they strongly know something about themselves, it must be due to some mysterious inner essence or soul etc. You know you are a man because, like all humans, you have been aware of the physical differences between men and women from when you were a tiny child, and will have received constant confirmation from the world and people around you that you were a boy. How we feel about who we are is formed by our upbringing and experiences. Our sex is not.

@devondad1 aw, your son is playing out. Bet you knew what a woman was when choosing who to carry him.

We’ve had two out of three of the main pro trans ideology arguments on here (the missing one is enthusiastic parents of ‘trans’ children)

1. from men who enjoy role playing as women: I’m not competitive and rational, I don’t like to be assertive and in charge of things (to use the OP’s precise words), therefore I cannot be a man. Therefore it logically follows that I am a woman. This explains why I like to be attractive and wear nicer clothes and why I consider myself to be cooperative, empathic and emotional

2. from men who don’t enjoy role playing as the opposite sex but buy into it: I know I am a man, so if this man knows he is a woman he must be right, and the explanations women give of why he’s not right can be handwaved away because what men think is important and what women think is not

It’s quite helpful in a way to have demonstrations every so often. It shows how utterly irrational the beliefs are and how they dissolve under even the mildest questions

there is little point engaging with these people other than for entertainment value. They have fundamentally irrational beliefs and they’re good with that

Hi everyone,

Sorry I've been AFK a while - even TRAs need to sleep and eat sometimes.

I realise there are still a lot of questions I haven't got to yet. One or two (eg "have you got a penis") I won't respond to because they are inappropriate and highly personal. But I do hope to cover as many of the others as possible, including the difficult ones.

I'm also grateful to @devondad1 for reminding us that some trans people have very different perspectives to my own. We are all different, and I can only speak for myself, not the entirety of the trans community.

Also, I've given you my views about the psychological differences between men and women and why I consider myself to be female. I realise your views may differ from my own significantly. I explained my position on this because several of you asked me to to so, not because I wanted to upset or offend anyone.

Which brings me to my fundamental point. How can we get along with each other and meet everybody's needs, given that we have such different perspectives on the nature of sex and gender?

Work it out without intruding on women's spaces and without telling women what we are or are not, and how we must be psychologically and socially.

So third spaces, great, and stop appropriating and defining a category that is not yours. Create your own.

OK. Why are your views and perspectives on what makes you a woman more important than the views of actual women? Why do we need to get along with your perspective on this?

I realise there are still a lot of questions I haven't got to yet. One or two (eg "have you got a penis") I won't respond to because they are inappropriate and highly personal
Personal, yes. Inappropriate, though? No. Not when you're here telling us you're a woman because you don't feel like other men.

How can we get along with each other and meet everybody's needs, given that we have such different
Are you seriously asking how women can meet your needs to be accepted as a woman, at the expense of women needing you not to bloody do that?

How can we get along with each other and meet everybody's needs, given that we have such different perspectives on the nature of sex and gender?

Respect our views; respect that women have and are discriminated against and repressed because of immutable sex biology that you have not, and cannot, experience; respect our single sex spaces and do your own work to create safe spaces for trans people, without taking women’s. Acknowledge that you are a trans woman, which is different to a woman.

OK, well lets have a go at THE question.

Like any other word, "woman" is a concept humankind has developed to assist in understanding and communicating about the world. Specifically it is a classification we apply to human beings because we find it useful to distinguish between "woman" and "not woman" for a wide variety of purposes.

Biology won't give you a definition of the word "woman" any more than astrophysics will give you a definition of the word "planet". Both concepts are sorting categories imposed by society. Sometimes these concepts evolve over time and sometimes they can mean slightly different things in different contexts (eg true north vs magnetic north, or sidereal day vs solar day).

Normally, this classification is pretty clear but what we are looking at here is borderline cases where a person's body does not align with the way they feel about themselves and wish to live.

The precise definition, or definitions, we use for the word "woman" (and "man") are therefore a social choice based on whether we wish to include individuals in their preferred category or not. There is no getting away from this conscious choice by referring to "the science", because "the science" does not tell us how we should label, classify and treat one another in society.

The precise definition, or definitions, we use for the word "woman" (and "man") are therefore a social choice based on whether we wish to include individuals in their preferred category or not. There is no getting away from this conscious choice by referring to "the science", because "the science" does not tell us how we should label, classify and treat one another in society
So, "Women" means actual biological women and anyone who would prefer to be a woman rather than the man they are...
I had a vague hope you were going to at least try a bit harder than this, but no, same old shite.
Jesus.

"Female" is simply a descriptor, like "blonde" or "Caucasian" or "Libra". If you choose to treat someone as having a specific personality due to that descriptor - as OP seems intent on doing - then that's on you.

You must, surely, realise you're doing this - "matching" a physical descriptor directly to a personality trait - gbased on no empirical data^ whatsoever, right? You've just decided "people born in February are indecisive" or the equivent, right?

where a person's body does not align with the way they feel about themselves and wish to live.

If i have a female body, please set out for me what "way to wish to live" that means. Please.

Or if I have a Black body, please set out for me how I should feel about myself to match with that body. @AlphaTransWoman

Man alive

so what’s the word for the people who get their clitoris and labia cut off in the Gambia again? Funnily enough there seems to be no difficulty identifying them

Biology won't give you a definition of the word "woman"

Of course it does. An adult member of the female sex.

Which brings me to my fundamental point. How can we get along with each other and meet everybody's needs, given that we have such different perspectives on the nature of sex and gender?

we don’t

no one is obliged to meet unreasonable needs

the OP’s ‘need’ to be perceived as a woman when he is in fact a man is utterly unreasonable. It’s difficult to say no to unreasonable people because they’re often energetically batshit (see: witnesses at Jo Phoenix employee tribunal), but to protect the reasonable needs of others (in this case the rights of women to privacy, dignity and safety), we do need to say no

the answer is no OP. You are not a woman